Tyler Perry: What’s the Beef?

Apparently I didn’t get enough hate mail from my  post on Steve Harvey’s book, I’ve decided to step into another hailstorm. I posted this over at What About Our Daughters? in response to why I think we cannot allow Perry’s Mammified coonery to persist.

As far as to whether Tyler Perry is important or not I think most fail to see the big picture. He is emblematic of the reckless disregard that the so-called black community has for black women. We’re to ignore this blatant insult because there are ‘more important issues.’ Eff that, because as a sociologist I can tell you that imagery is important. That rhyme sticks and stones is a misnomer, and here’s why. Before you can destroy a people you must first depersonalize them, strip them of their humanity. The people in Rwanda didn’t suddenly start hacking their neighbors to death with machetes. The media was used to indoctrinate them into the notion that they were less than human and thus suitable to be slaughtered.

Surely you’ve seen the propaganda films the Nazis used against people in Germany. Even criminals employ a similar technique: Their victims are never people, they’re marks, johns, pigeons, stupes. Anything but human. These names like goonette, imagery like Madea, Rasputia and the like tell the world that black women aren’t human. That we’re available as prey. They rob us of our humanity and thus place us in greater danger.

For want of a nail a shoe was lost…We ignore these ’small insults’ to our peril. We allow those who would rob us of our humanity and thus our lives to flourish and we are complicit in our own destruction. This is always as it has been with black women. And this is why our girls are not now and never will be safe in our so-called communities. We don’t care enough to do what is uncomfortable. If your right eye offend thee cut it out, yet we’re not even willing to give up mindless entertainment. The Bible is hard taskmaster, too bad so many people are only Sunday morning Christians.